Before I started reading blogs and owning one, most of my time spent on the internet would be doing one and only one thing – writing and reading emails. I did not own a Facebook account at that time, same case with Twitter. When people used to say you can update your status daily – I used to be like what to put up as status daily? Farmville was in great vogue and I saw my colleagues go crazy behind it. Wanting to remain sane, I refrained from all of the social networking sites, baring Orkut, which I logged in once in a blue moon.

Emails hold a very special place in my virtual life. I started communicating them long before SMSing became fashionable. The beauty of the emails of yore was the forwarded email chain, where in you would find hundreds and thousands of addresses and they would contain knowledge of immense value – Life lessons and scenic pictures mainly 😆 Even getting those repeated forwards used to give a high – knowing that you are in the lists of so many people 😀

I used to write emails often to folks from school and college, discussing so many regular and silly stuff, birthdays and new jobs, holidays and new beginnings. When I got an account for myself in Facebook, the regularity stopped and so did the frequency. It became easier to know about your friends updates, without communicating to them. And that kinda made me a bit sad. So the people with whom I communicated via emails became even shorter. Then last year I started using WhatsApp and even Facebook became cumbersome 😀 Why to login and visit a friends profile and post a message when you can easily ping them. All this quick and instant modes of communication have sounded a death knell for my love of writing emails 😦 I now have exactly two blessed souls who have yet not caved in to the mad mania of instant messaging and still resort to writing.

I wish to write and talk using emails. Anyone up for becoming my virtual pen-pal?

It is a time warp for me in many situations, life at my parents’s and at my in-laws’s is vastly different. There are many things lying around here which evoke memories and long forgotten habits.

So I had to note down some items which needed to be bought from the market, when I saw a pen stand having many pens and a lone pencil. I took the pencil and started writing. Nothing seemed out-of-place, yet I felt I am going back to ‘those times’. At work, I have always used pens whenever the need arose, which was very minimal. I use the virtual notepads and stickies to write everything, from noting phone numbers, web links, even cash transactions, practically what needs to be written down.

Pencils were actively used during the high school exam preparations, practicing out pages and pages of biology sketches. Before that it was the mandatory art class, until primary where we would compare with each other which pencil would be darker. The main brands which we used were Nataraj and Apsara. There used to be one pencil with white background and flowers imprinted, it used to write very light, I am unable to recollect its name. Before sharpeners were common place, folks at my home used blades to carve out the graphite when the tip used to be broken. As kids, we would watch in fascination how under a matter of few minutes, mummy would sharpen out the lead. We were never given blades lest we cut our hands. But kids of which age have listened to their parents 😛 Brother and I had several under-the-cover sessions of blade and pencil, of which we were caught once and had a sound thrashing 😆